Sissu Tarka

Suzi Webster & Jordan Benwick

Takayuki Yamamoto & Naohiro Deguchi

W. B. Harvey

ZEVS

Freefall: Mediated Questions and Answers on the Digital Experience of Real and Virtual

John Francescutti & Lanfranco Aceti

London, April 20, 2007

This is an interview with Dr. Lanfranco Aceti, Honorary Research Fellow at the
Slade School of Fine Art and Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Department of
Computer Science, Virtual Reality Environments, UCL.

Dr. Aceti is an international artist and academic who explores the issues of
representation and technocultures in contemporary digital media.

And it is right that you should learn all things,
Both the steadfast heart of persuasive truth,
And the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.

Parmenides of Elea, Fragments, 28-30.

John Francescutti:Ideally how would you like viewers to experience your
work - as a real, virtual or mixed reality construct?

Lanfranco Aceti: The modus in which the viewers should experience my work
has become part of the artwork itself and a determinant element of it and it
doesn't fall necessarily in any of the strictly defined categories you have
presented me with. Having a choice I would prefer for the viewer to understand
the complexities of the process of production as well as the historical
development and cultural layers of the media used to produce the artwork.
Recently I was part of FRAMED, an exhibition of electronic media that took
place in London, and the issue of how to 'frame' a virtual reality image within
the context of classic media representations returned to haunt me. The final
decision was to create a classic print and let the image speak for itself,
although all the information relevant to the process of its creation and
transfers between media had been lost.

I guess that, ideally, I would like the viewers to witness the complicated
process of creation that, through complex trans-media transfers, generates final
images that become objects which can not be simplistically defined... an
interactive experience, a video, a print, a painting, etc. This is to say that
'ideally' the viewer would have an understanding of what the background of the
artwork is: e.g. the perspectives of the artist as an author, the relationship
between the artist/author and the artwork itself and the context... I am
speaking of a complex matrix of relationships that cannot be simplistically
revealed by the 'intention' of the artist/author, the intention of the
viewer/reader and the intention of the work itself. It is a new aesthetic that
is determined by the historical language of each medium and by the mixing of
these media.

Figure 1. Pandora Boxed, Lanfranco Aceti, 2005, (photography, digital
media and VR). The grain and colors of the artwork as well as its blurred
representation stimulate particular sense-perceptions. The image was constructed
initially as a Polaroid photograph and then digitally altered. It was printed
and drawn on with charcoal, scanned, transferred in 3D Studio Max and then
programmed into DIVE as an environment backdrop based on neuroscientific visual
analyses. At this stage it was photographed in the CAVE, then printed, sketched
with charcoal and finally scanned and balanced in Photoshop. The image was then
printed with a digital printer on glossy paper. (Dimension 180 cm x 110 cm,
exhibited at FRAMED). For this project the artist was inspired by the myth
of Pandora's Vase and of the word Pandora that means 'all gifts.'

In the recent developments of intelligent autonomous artworks, the construct of
an autonomous behavior of the artwork, disjointed by the intentions of the
reader and the author, is becoming an interpretative reality. The complexity of
these forms of experiences makes it difficult to 'frame' the innovative context
of the artwork with the sedimented forms of interactions of classic media.

A work that, in my case, is inspired by the contrast between reality and
illusion and constructed on neuroaesthetic applications in the field of the
visual arts 'ideally' stimulates the viewer to feel by playing on the fine
line between inspiration and manipulation. The viewer becomes a part of the
artwork, an extension of its existence, the viewer is the element of an
autonomous chain reaction that, from the world of the illusory, alters and
disrupts the world of reality.

If it is possible to imagine, from a neuroaesthetic perspective, an artwork that
alters the way we feel, the way the synaptic patterns are constructed, then it
is possible to imagine an artwork that alters the way we think, engage and
relate. This is either an incredible opportunity or the road to damnation
created by the contemporary mediated reality. This duality is what I strive to
have the viewers experience and become aware of.

J. Francescutti:From what you have just described your work is not limited to
its 'objectual' manifestation but is an element that generates behavioral
manifestations and as such is in continuous development in the contemporary
evolutionary transmedia framework. How do you see your work having an immediate
and/or mediated relationship with this ideal viewer?

L. Aceti: The relationship of immediate and/or mediated engagements is a
structural part of human existence and human art productions. The engagement
with reality is mediated through the physiological interactions of the body. The
brain acts as a 'medium' and the feeling of 'presence/consciousness' is a form
of perception that acts as a personalized perception of the medium and/or filter
of something that is only a personally mediated interpretation of reality.

In this sense the 'immediate' perception is just that, the instantaneous
relationship with the artwork, which does not exclude the fact that the
engagement is not at the same time highly mediated. My work is constructed on
the awareness of these issues and consciously attempts to modify and alter the
sense of perception of the viewer. The viewer for me is an extension of the
artwork and I would like to ideally manipulate the visual perceptions of the
viewer as an extension of the artwork.

The contemporary condition has reduced the art perception to an homogenized form
of engagement that becomes a 'fake' participation in 'aesthetically pre-approved
and fake interactive' journeys. The mediated relationship presents the
'immediacy' or instantaneity of the engagement as its outmost achievement, when,
in reality, this is an outcome based on lengthy processes of creation. The
'immediate' experience of a 'technologically free' reality is only an illusion
or the element of an engagement based on a representation of the 'natural'
constructed with a 'highly mediated and technological' reality. The ideal
viewers would be able to fight back and/or alter and control the manipulative
representation of reality that they are presented with.

J. Francescutti:You appear to present the viewer with a very deterministic
representation of the world and even the artwork, as a consequence of this,
appears to be the product of a mediated system that does not leave space to the
soul...

L. Aceti: The attempt to describe the subjective interpretation of the viewer of
the artwork away from the 'preformatted' and mediated structures of the work of
art appears to be simplistic and a bit na•ve. The assumption denies the
necessary engineering that happens with the construction of the artwork and has
always happened in the past. These aesthetic constructions are based on the
development of an aesthetic language that is medium specific. From Phidia, to
Michelangelo to contemporary art applications, Stalinist art for example, the
'engineering of the human soul' happens with the framing of the landscape, the
human figure or the choice of colors and shapes that frame the viewer's
perspective and form the aesthetic interactions with the artwork. Every work of
art has the responsibility of its engagements and the structural motives and the
choice of offering a framework of 'self-serving' art is a structural imposition
on the perspectives and interpretations of the viewer. If one element of art is
communication, then the definition and construction of an artwork, similarly to
that of a phrase, is a process of mediated communication.

J. Francescutti:You appear to depict a fairly grim outlook for both artist and
viewer. Is your work a response to what you pose as the anti-humanist condition
of our society?

L. Aceti: My position is certainly not based on the conflicting representation
of utopia vs. dystopia, but on a complex mediated social existence and the
ethical value of technology, which, if inserted in the social context, has the
onus to participate in a social and civilized evolution. Having said this I need
to clarify that the 'grim outlook' is based on the contemporary ideological
frameworks that have generated an anti-humanist social condition. Part of my
work focuses strongly on the multiple facets of this process, analyzing both the
relation to 'a fascist genetic inheritance' of technology as a human product and
the necessity of understanding the relation between the relative and absolute
existence of perceptions and truths. On this second point I am philosophically
and, from a neuroscience point of view, close to Parmenides and therefore
perceive 'the universe' as an existence of levels of truths and realities, both
accessible and not accessible.

The anti-humanist condition is a renewed contemporary digital structure that,
once having swapped the social model for the economic model, becomes a reality
of engagement. On this model the construction of the digital has been based on
the reduction of 'humanity' in sellable datasets: it brings to mind at the same
time both the utopian Futuristic approach to technology as a form of liberation
and the use of technology to 'catalogue' and deport Jews in WWII.

My artworks attempt to demonstrate the level of control exercised in apparently
innocuous forms of mediated interactions. The representation of the
instantaneous is a 'fake' and the mediated existence is a filter that
structures, conditions and controls forms of expression and behaviors. If we are
mediated by our brains' neurological structures, in today's transmediated
reality we are also mediated by the digital neuronal networks. The engagement is
no longer that of Burroughs' free and automatic artistic expressions, but one of
continuous assertion and re-assertion of self-control and self-determination
under the digital mediated experience that surveys and controls the external and
internal existence of the human body.

J. Francescutti:In order to postulate the disappearance of the artist and the
viewer, it seems you have a definitive idea of how to define these roles. How
would you define them? Do you think that net art, in particular, asks us to
rethink the nature of these categories?

L. Aceti: I wish I had a 'definitive' and orderly definition, but that is not in
my nature or in my abilities... [laughter] The idea of having a definitive
something is exactly what worries me about the human incapacity for an
instantaneous and mediated experience, which today has become the instantaneous
mediated reality. This instantaneous mediated reality provides engagements that
are based on the glossing of existence, interactions and visual representations.

The print work at Framed, titled Pandora Boxed, was glossed several times to
take the shape of a real glossy print similar to the mediated visuals that
surround our daily existence. At the same time the hidden neuroaesthetic agenda
of the work, the constriction of the visual aesthetic/neuronal experience, was
invisible. I have some knowledge of the new role that mediated artworks are
taking, a role of enhanced 'autonomous' existence that, similar to the cyborg of
Haraway, lives by itself. Therefore, there is a disappearance of the traditional
roles played by the artist and the viewer.

My issue is that I do not believe that these artworks will be liberators in a
neo-futurist approach. Although this approach may preserve, through its
mediation, a genetic human cultural inheritance, an aura that is the imprint of
its creator, as Benjamin would say, the forms of engagement are different.

Therefore the relationship to these new forms, in particular net art, are
altered. There is a necessity to understand that the artist is a creator of
behaviors and cultural parameters in the viewer and that the viewer is obliged
to behave within the software parameters set by the author. For me this is a
form of control of the viewer, and in much of net art, the interactive
engagement is an ordered and definitely controlled one.

I think that net art is obliging us to rethink how old forms of enslavement and
social constrictions are empowered in the digital realm, wiping out the old
categories and generating new forms of action/interaction in the real that are
definitely removed from the visual and hidden in the structural component,
almost often invisible, of the artwork presented.

Brief Biography

Dr. Lanfranco Aceti is a Leverhulme artist in residence and researcher at the
Department of Computer Science, Virtual Reality Environments at University
College London. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Slade School of
Fine Art.

John Francescutti has an MA EMCA (Enterprise Management for the Creative Arts)
from the London College of Communication. He works as an arts manager and
curator for digital and Internet art.

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible through the support of The Leverhulme Trust, the
Department of Computer Science, Virtual Reality Environments at UCL and the
Slade School of Fine Art.